Windows 10: Bing.com now runs on .NET Core 2.1

Brink · Aug 20, 2018

Bing.com is a cloud service that runs on thousands of servers spanning many datacenters across the globe. Bing servers handle thousands of users’ queries every second from consumers around the world doing searches through their browsers, from our partners using the Microsoft Cognitive Services APIs, and from the personal digital assistant, Cortana. Our users demand both relevancy and speed in those results, thus performance and reliability are key components in running a successful cloud service such as Bing.

Bing’s front-end stack is written predominantly in managed code layered in an MVC pattern. Most of the business logic code is written as data models in C#, and the view logic is written in Razor. This layer is responsible for transforming the search result data (encoded as Microsoft Bond) to HTML that is then compressed and sent to the browser. As gatekeepers of that front-end platform at Bing, we consider developer productivity and feature agility as additional key components in our definition of success. Hundreds of developers rely on this platform to get their features to production, and they expect it to run like clockwork.

Since its beginning, Bing.com has run on the .NET Framework, but it recently transitioned to running on .NET Core. The main reasons driving Bing.com’s adoption of .NET Core are performance (a.k.a serving latency), support for side-by-side and app-local installation independent of the machine-wide installation (or lack thereof) and ReadyToRun images. In anticipation of those improvements, we started an effort to make the code portable across .NET implementations, rather than relying on libraries only available on Windows and only with the .NET Framework. The team started the effort with .NET Standard 1.x, but the reduced API surface caused non-trivial complications for our code migrations. With the 20,000+ APIs that returned with .NET Standard 2.0, all that changed, and we were able to quickly shift gears from code modifications to testing. After squashing a few bugs, we were ready to deploy .NET Core to production.

ReadyToRun Images

Managed applications often can have poor startup performance as methods first have to be JIT compiled to machine code. .NET Framework has a precompilation technology, NGEN. However, NGEN requires the precompilation step to occur on the machine on which the code will execute. For Bing, that would mean NGENing on thousands of machines. This coupled with an aggressive deployment cycle would result in significant serving capacity reduction as the application gets precompiled on the web-serving machines. Furthermore, running NGEN requires administrative privileges, which are often unavailable or heavily scrutinized in a datacenter setting. On .NET Core, the crossgen tool allows the code to be precompiled as a pre-deployment step, such as in the build lab, and the images deployed to production are Ready To Run!

Performance

.NET Core 2.1 has made major performance improvements in virtually all areas of the runtime and libraries; a great treatise is available on a previous post in the blog.

Our production data resonates with the significant performance improvements in .NET Core 2.1 (as compared to both .NET Core 2.0 and .NET Framework 4.7.2). The graph below tracks our internal server latency over the last few months. The Y axis is the latency (actual values omitted), and the final precipitous drop (on June 2) is the deployment of .NET Core 2.1! That is a 34% improvement, all thanks to the hard work of the .NET community!

The following changes in .NET Core 2.1 are the highlights of this phenomenal improvement for our workload. They’re presented in decreasing order of impact.
1. Vectorization of string.Equals (@jkotas) & string.IndexOf/LastIndexOf (@eerhardt)
Whichever way you slice it, HTML rendering and manipulation are string-heavy workloads. String comparisons and indexing operations are major components of that. Vectorization of these operations is the single biggest contributor to the performance improvement we’ve measured.
2. Devirtualization Support for EqualityComparer<T>.Default (@AndyAyersMS)
One of our major software components is a heavy user of Dictionary<int/long, V>, which indirectly benefits from the intrinsic recognition work that was done in the JIT to make Dictionary<K, V> amenable to that optimization (@benaadams)
3. Software Write Watch for Concurrent GC (@Maoni0 and @kouvel)
This led to reduction in CPU usage in our application. Prior to .NET Core 2.1, the write-watch on Windows x64 (and on the .NET Framework) was implemented using Windows APIs that had a different performance trade-off. This new implementation relies on a JIT Write Barrier, which intuitively increases the cost of a reference store, but that cost is amortized and not noticed in our workload. This improvement is now also available on the .NET Framework via May 2018 Security and Quality Rollup
4. Methods with calli are now inline-able (@AndyAyersMS and @mjsabby)
We use ldftn + calli in lieu of delegates (which incur an object allocation) in performance-critical pieces of our code where there is a need to call a managed method indirectly. This change allowed method bodies with a calli instruction to be eligible for inlining. Our dependency injection framework generates such methods.
5. Improve performance of string.IndexOfAny for 2 & 3 char searches (@bbowyersmyth)
A common operation in a front-end stack is search for ‘:’, ‘/’, ‘/’ in a string to delimit portions of a URL. This special-casing improvement was beneficial throughout the codebase.

In addition to the runtime changes, .NET Core 2.1 also brought Brotli support to the .NET Library ecosystem. Bing.com uses this capability to dynamically compress the content and deliver it to supporting browsers.

Runtime Agility

Finally, the ability to have an xcopy version of the runtime inside our application means we’re able to adopt newer versions of the runtime at a much faster pace. In fact, if you peek at the graph above we took the .NET Core 2.1 update worldwide in a regular application deployment on June 2, which is two days after it was released!

This was possible because we were running our continuous integration (CI) pipeline with .NET Core’s daily CI builds testing functionality and performance all the way through the release.

We’re excited about the future and are collaborating closely with the .NET team to help them qualify their future updates! The .NET Core team is excited because of our large catalog of functional tests and an additional large codebase to measure real-world performance improvements on, as well as our commitment to providing both Bing.com users fast results and our own developers working with the latest software and tools.

This blog post was authored by Mukul Sabharwal (@mjsabby) from the Bing.com Engineering team.
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Source: Bing.com runs on .NET Core 2.1! | .NET Blog

:)

Brink · Aug 20, 2018

Announcing .NET Core 2.1

We’re excited to announce the release of .NET Core 2.1. It includes improvements to performance, to the runtime and tools. It also includes a new way to deploy tools as NuGet packages. We’ve added a new primitive type called Span<T> that operates on data without allocations. There are many other new APIs, focused on cryptography, compression, and Windows compatibility. It is the first release to support Alpine Linux and ARM32 chips. You can start updating existing projects to target .NET Core 2.1 today. The release is compatible with .NET Core 2.0, making updating easy.

ASP.NET Core 2.1 and Entity Framework Core 2.1 are also releasing today.

You can download and get started with .NET Core 2.1, on Windows, macOS, and Linux:

.NET Core 2.1 SDK (includes the runtime)

.NET Core 2.1 Runtime

.NET Core 2.1 is supported by Visual Studio 15.7, Visual Studio for Mac and Visual Studio Code.

Docker images are available at microsoft/dotnet for .NET Core and ASP.NET Core.

The Build 2018 conference was earlier this month. We had several in-depth presentations on .NET Core. Check out Build 2018 sessions for .NET on Channel9.

You can see complete details of the release in the .NET Core 2.1 release notes. Related instructions, known issues, and workarounds are included in the releases notes. Please report any issues you find in the comments or at dotnet/core #1614

Thanks for everyone that contributed to .NET Core 2.1. You’ve helped make .NET Core a better product!
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Read more: Announcing .NET Core 2.1 | .NET Blog

Waseemulla S · Aug 20, 2018

Microsoft .NET Framework, Unhandled exception

Hi,

Welcome to Microsoft Community.

I suggest you to un-check and recheck .Net framework 3.5 and .Net framework 4.6 advance series from Windows features.

Try the following steps:

Press Windows + R keys to open Run command.

Type Appwiz.cpl and select "turn Windows feature on or off" from the left

Uncheck .Net framework 3.5 and .Net framework 4.6 advance series.

Restart the computer

Repeat step 1 and 2 and check .Net framework 3.5 and .Net framework 4.6 advance series.

Restart the computer.

Regards,

Brink · Aug 20, 2018

.NET Core 1.0 is now released!

I feel like it's the culmination of all these years of work in .NET and Open Source. This is why I came to work at Microsoft; we wanted to open source as much as we could and build a community around .NET and open source at Microsoft. 15 years and the work of thousands of people later, today we released .NET Core 1.0.

Take a moment and head over to http://dot.net and check out the download page. It's got a really nice place you can try out C# directly in the browser without having to install anything! There's also a great C# Tutorial with interactive browser-based tools as well.

.NET Core 1.0 runs on Windows, Mac, and several flavors of Linux including RedHat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu. It supports C#, VB, and F# and modern constructs like generics, Language Integrated Query (LINQ), async support and more. The Core Runtime, libraries, compiler, languages and tools are all open source on GitHub where contributions are accepted, tested and fully supported.

Getting started with .NET Core

If you use Visual Studio 2015 (and remember, Visual Studio Community is free!) you should get VS2015 Update 3 first then install the .NET Core Tools for Visual Studio.

If you don't want to use VS, consider using Visual Studio Code for free and install the C# extension from the marketplace to get a great code editing experience along with the .NET Core SDK for Windows. Of course, if you're on Mac/Linux/Whatever, go over to http://dot.net and download whatever's right for you!

If you want all the advanced and specific downloads for .NET or .NET Core, there's a table here.

What is .NET Core? Here's some details from the .NET Blog:
.NET Core is a new cross-platform .NET product. The primary points of .NET Core are:

Cross-platform: Runs on Windows, macOS and Linux.

Flexible deployment: Can be included in your app or installed side-by-side user- or machine-wide.

Command-line tools: All product scenarios can be exercised at the command-line.

Compatible: .NET Core is compatible with .NET Framework, Xamarin and Mono, via the .NET Standard Library.

Open source: The .NET Core platform is open source, using MIT and Apache 2 licenses. Documentation is licensed under CC-BY. .NET Core is a .NET Foundation project.

Supported by Microsoft: .NET Core is supported by Microsoft, per .NET Core Support

.NET Core is composed of the following parts:

A .NET runtime, which provides a type system, assembly loading, a garbage collector, native interop and other basic services.

A set of framework libraries, which provide primitive data types, app composition types and fundamental utilities.

A set of SDK tools and language compilers that enable the base developer experience, available in the .NET Core SDK.

The ‘dotnet’ app host, which is used to launch .NET Core apps. It selects and hosts the runtime, provides an assembly loading policy and launches the app. The same host is also used to launch SDK tools in the same way.

Blogs

Here are the major blogs carrying the announcement.

Announcing .NET Core 1.0

Announcing ASP.NET Core 1.0

Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 and .NET Core 1.0 Available Now

We are also releasing .NET documentation today at docs.microsoft.com, the new documentation service for Microsoft.

The documentation you see there is just a start. You can follow our progress at core-docs on GitHub. ASP.NET Core documentation is also available and open source.

Have fun!
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Source: .NET Core 1.0 is now released! - Scott Hanselman

Windows 10: Bing.com now runs on .NET Core 2.1

Bing.com now runs on .NET Core 2.1

Bing.com now runs on .NET Core 2.1

Bing.com now runs on .NET Core 2.1

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